The Matrix (1999) review

The Matrix arrived at the exact moment the internet stopped being a novelty and started being infrastructure, and it told the audience that the thing they were spending their lives inside might be a cage. That timing is a large part of why it felt like a revelation rather than just a very good action film.

Premise and Philosophical Borrowing

Neo is a programmer and hacker who suspects something is wrong with the world. He is correct: humanity is being farmed for energy inside a simulated reality, and the resistance needs him to be the prophesied liberator. The Wachowskis wear their sources openly — Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation appears physically in the film, Plato's cave is restaged, and the cyberpunk inheritance from Gibson and Dick is obvious throughout.

What the film does well is refuse to make its philosophy a lecture. The choice between the red and blue pill is famous because it is dramatised as an irreversible physical act rather than a debate. Morpheus explains the world in one efficient sequence and then the film spends the rest of its runtime letting the audience feel the implications through action rather than exposition.

Read more about sci-fi cinema in our Science Fiction genre hub, explore the work of Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski in our directors section, or see where this film lands in best films of the 1990s.

Action and Technique

The bullet-time sequences were the film's headline innovation and they changed action cinema for a decade, mostly for the worse once imitators got hold of them. What is often forgotten is that the technique was used sparingly — roughly two major moments in the entire film — and that the Wachowskis brought in Yuen Woo-ping to choreograph wire-fu properly. The lobby shootout is a Hong Kong action scene with an American budget, and it remains thrilling.

The production design by Owen Paterson is the film's most underrated element. The Matrix itself is deliberately green-tinted and slightly over-lit, while the real world is cold blue and filthy. That visual distinction does the work that dialogue would otherwise have to do, and it makes the film's central opposition legible at a glance.

Casting and Performance

Keanu Reeves is the correct choice precisely because of his limitations. Neo is supposed to be a man who has not yet become anything, and Reeves' slightly blank quality reads as untapped potential rather than emptiness. He is also genuinely convincing in the physical sequences, which matters more than line delivery in a film like this.

Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus is the film's best performance — a true believer whose certainty is both inspiring and slightly frightening. Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith is a perfect piece of casting, playing a program with bureaucratic contempt rather than malice. Carrie-Anne Moss' Trinity was genuinely ahead of its time in 1999 and is the template for a great deal of what followed.

Legacy and Limitations

The sequels damaged the original's reputation retroactively by explaining too much, and the fourth film is best treated as a separate curiosity. Judged on its own, The Matrix is tighter than its reputation suggests, and its mythology is mostly implied rather than spelled out.

The film's limitations are visible in hindsight. It is very white for a story about liberation, and its 'chosen one' structure is more conventional than its surface suggests. Its treatment of the real world as straightforwardly good and the simulation as straightforwardly false is philosophically simpler than the ideas it invokes. None of this stops it from being one of the most influential films of the last thirty years, and one of the most purely enjoyable.

Themes and ideas

• Simulated reality
• Free will vs. determinism
• Liberation and its costs
• Technology as control